I first got to know John Izzo in a tent on safari in Tanzania. Our 3-week journey led us to one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa. Our leader was none other than our mutual mentor, Richard Leider, the "Pope of Purpose." John had already established himself as a global leadership author, speaker, and consultant. Little did I know that 11 years later CPL and John would be joining Richard in a global purpose movement, and John would write a defining book called The Purpose Revolution. - Craig

The Purpose Gap

Dr. John Izzo

What is the Purpose Gap? It is both an opportunity and threat in the business world today. It exists because there a distinct difference between what people desire and hope for, and what is actually being delivered by businesses and organizations. Today a purpose gap exists for both employees and customers.

Seventy seven percent of employees say there is matters a great deal to work for a company they believe in and a job where they have a sense of purpose. Fifty percent of Millennials would take a pay cut to work for the right company, and almost forty percent cite purpose as the main driver of their engagement and retention at work. Yet the vast majority of people, 75%, say that they don’t work for this type of company- that the company they work for mostly cares about profit and its own self-interest. Therein lies the purpose gap for employees.

Peter Block became a foundational mentor when we founded Heartland/CPL 22 years ago. His writing and thought leadership (The Answer to How is Yes and Community: The Structure of Belonging) were both primary texts for the early Art of Convening Trainings. The essay below states the case for purpose shared as convening, and convening as a foundational characteristic of an on-purpose leader.

Leadership is ConveningExcerpt from Community: The Structure of Belonging, by Peter Block Berrett-Koehler Publishers, May 2008In communal transformation, leadership is about intention, convening, valuing relatedness, and presenting choices. It is not a personality characteristic or a matter of style, and therefore it requires nothing more than what all of us already have.

This means we can stop looking for leadership as though it were scarce or lost, or it had to be trained into us by experts. If our traditional form of leadership has been studied for so long, written about with such admiration, defined by so many, worshipped by so few, and the cause of so much disappointment, maybe doing more of all that is not productive. The search for great leadership is a prime example of how we too often take something that does not work and try harder at it. I have written elsewhere about reconstructing leader as social architect.

Cindy Kent was the lead Conversation Starter at our 20th Anniversary Conference in 2016. As a thought and purposeful leader, her values are central to all she does and how she does it.

Making Happy

In nearly five decades of life, and too-many-experiences-to-count later, I have come to realize how misguided the notion of finding happiness is. You don’t really find happy, in truth, we make happy. Finding Happy is an ill-conceived notion, that inherently implies that happiness is some illusive by-product of luck or fortune or even, some edenic destination—a wistful, ideologue of a reward at the end of one’s diligent pursuit. Instead, I believe, we make happy—one decision, one choice, at a time.

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We're honored to publish this original essay by Richard Leider, the "father" of the Purpose Movement as our inaugural posting for our Purpose Shared Series. Who better than Richard to share his reflections on what is needed and wanted from our leaders in these days of destabilization?

Becoming a Wise Leader

“When there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do no harm.” ‐ African proverb

The ultimate test of wise leadership is this:

Can you regard your leadership, no matter how dire the challenge, as one of serving the common good of others? Do you have a purpose larger than yourself for leading?

Most of us have a keen awareness of wisdom when it is present in our leaders (and in ourselves). And, we have an uneasy feeling of distrust and disengagement with it is absent.

To become a wise leader, one must be “people wise.”

Have you recently heard an inner voice whispering to you things like: “I don’t think I can do it?” “I’m not enough.” “What if I fail?”

That is the enemy within you speaking to you. It is the voice that speaks to you when you need to step outside your comfort zone. It’s the voice of fear. We all hear it occasionally. It’s part of being human.

The answer is not to kill it or suffocate it – but, to dive head first into it! Identify the voice with choice, curiosity, and courage.